Free Father Christmas by Judith Arnold Page A

by while a
little boy wept in silence.
    “ Do you need some lap
time?” she asked.
    He didn’t say a word. He also didn’t look
away as she stood and circled the desk. The tears kept spilling
down his face as she crossed the small room, eased his clenched
fingers from the arms of the chair, lifted him and sat, pulling him
down onto her lap. Only then did he let go, curling up against her
and sobbing inconsolably.
    This wasn’t about a toy airplane. This was
about a young, vulnerable child whose mother had walked out on him,
whose father did stressful, dangerous work. It was about a little
boy who had to let out some of the pain.
    She closed her arms around his trembling
body and rocked in the chair, letting him weep, letting him soak
her sweater with his tears. She wondered when he’d last cried this
hard, whether he’d been held like this, by a woman who cooed, “Shh,
shh, it’s all right,” the way Molly did. She wondered when the last
time was that someone had actually convinced Michael Russo that it
was all right—and whether, by claiming that it was, Molly was lying
to him.
    If she was, she hoped he
would forgive her. Because right now, more than anything else,
Michael needed to believe that it
was
all right, that when he ran out of tears his life would be a
little bit better. If she could give him nothing else, she would
give him her lap and her arms, her consoling murmurs and the hope
he would need to keep going.
    ***
    JOHN HOOKED HIS FINGER over the knot of his
tie and tugged, loosening it enough so he wouldn’t choke. A quick
glance in the mirror above the sink revealed the face his Santa
whiskers had hidden for most of the day. It also revealed a bemused
smile. He’d caught the ATM thief—or, more accurately, the thieves.
Given their ages, he almost thought they’d respond better to
interrogation if he kept the Santa suit on.
    But it was hung neatly on a wire hanger on
one of the wall hooks in the squad’s locker room. Interrogation or
no, John was glad to be back in his civilian clothes, without that
bulging pad strapped to his waist and without the fuzzy white wig
itching his forehead. Maybe the kids would show a bit more
contrition if they were questioned by someone dressed like a
man.
    He adjusted the straps of his holster on his
shoulders, then left the locker room. Muriel, the squad’s
administrative assistant, grinned up at him from her desk. “They’re
in room two, with their father,” she told him. “Coffey says to
handle this one delicately. You know who their father is, don’t
you?”
    John moved to his own desk and picked up his
notepad. “Dennis Murphy?”
    “ The
five-hundred-dollar-an-hour attorney.”
    “ If that’s what he pulls
down, it’s funny his kids have turned into bank
robbers.”
    Muriel shook her head and
laughed. “Go easy on them, Russo. They’re petrified. And their
father’s a tough hombre .”
    “ Right.” He lifted his
note pad and a pen and headed down the hall to the interrogation
rooms. At room number two, he knocked on the door and then opened
it.
    Two pairs of worried hazel eyes peered up at
him from two extremely worried seven-year-old faces, one male and
one female. The Murphy twins were in deep doo-doo, and to their
credit they knew it. John wasn’t so sure about the mastermind of
the heist: their baby-sitter, the fifteen-year-old son of the woman
whose account was being illegally emptied via the ATM.
    The mastermind and his mother were in
another interrogation room with Lieutenant Coffey. John had won the
honors with the Murphy twins and their tough-hombre lawyer father.
The kids looked cherubic, but John wasn’t fooled.
    The hot-shot lawyer strode briskly around
the table and gave John’s hand a bruising shake. “Dennis Murphy,”
he introduced himself. He was tall and fit, with a full head of
dark blond hair and a direct stare. His suit looked unobtrusively
expensive, but his tie, like John’s, was loosened at the
collar.
    “ Detective